Methods and apparatus for transacting business over a network are old in the art. For example, telephone communications have long been utilized to transact purchases and transfer funds between accounts. Likewise, current cable and satellite television systems allow viewers to order video and audio content paid for via a viewer's credit or debit account information. Additionally, “on-line” purchases of goods and services are becoming common over the INTERNET. However, such methods and apparatus do not allow a buyer and a seller to transact business utilizing a common or universal transaction system.
Digital information appliances (DIA) are electronic devices designed to perform a specific function or group of functions more efficiently than would a conventional computer system. Like computer systems, information appliances may be interconnected with a network such as the INTERNET to provide content and functions which would not be available when the appliances operated independently. Preferably, such network connections are transparent to the user so that the complexity of the underlying computer network is masked. In this manner, information appliances provide advantages in simplicity of operation and computing ease of use to their users.
As the proliferation of digital information appliances accelerates, it will become necessary to develop a standard system architecture and operating environment to facilitate their use and interconnection with each other and other networked devices. Such a system architecture may utilize a distributed object model employing object oriented programming methods. Object oriented programming is a programming paradigm (method) wherein a program is organized as a collection of discrete objects that are self-contained collections of data structures and routines that interact with that data. Such objects encapsulate related data and procedures so as to hide that information by allowing access to the data and procedures only through the object's published interface. Hence changes to the data and or procedures of the object are isolated from other objects. This provides an architecture that is more easily maintained since changes to an object's code does not affect other objects.
Likewise, object oriented programming methods provide for inheritance of an object's characteristics into another class of object. Thus, an object may be derived from a first object to form a second object which “inherits” certain properties of its parent object. This allows for both (1) the formation of subclasses of objects having more specialized features and/or capabilities, and (2) the reuse of individual objects in different programs. Thus, libraries of proven objects may be developed which may be used repeatedly in different applications.
In developing a standard appliance system architecture, it is desirable to allow access to objects in a transparent fashion so that objects created in different programming languages and objects residing on different appliances, network servers, or computer systems that are networked together are accessible to the user without extensive modification of the user's programming code. For computer networks, this capability may be provided by object oriented distributed environments such as the common object request broker architecture (CORBA). Such system architectures are based upon a client-server model, in which object servers provide public interfaces to object-clients that make requests of the object servers. Typically in such systems, the servers are objects consisting of data and associated methods. The object clients obtain access to the object servers by sending them messages which are mediated by the distributed system. When the server object receives the message it invokes the appropriate method and transmits the result back to the object client. The object-client and object server communicate through an Object Request Broker (ORB) which is used to locate the various distributed objects and establish communication between the objects and the client. However, such existing distributed object architectures require that all transactions (communications between client objects and server objects) must pass through an ORB. As a result, the ORB becomes a single failure point which could potentially disable such a system. Further, an ORB typically requires a large amount of memory. Thus, architectures such as CORBA would be unsuitable for “thin” (simple) appliances which have a limited amount of memory.
Consequently, it would be advantageous to develop an information appliance management system employing a standard appliance system architecture. Such an information appliance management system would provide greater fault tolerance than conventional object based architectures, and may be implemented on thin appliances having a limited amount of memory.
Additionally, it may be desirable to provide distributed functionality over a network to enable even “thin” digital information appliances access to functionality previously attainable only on “thick” digital information appliances.